"This spectacle of sacrifice, of devotion to others, is needed as an
uplift," he went on earnestly, "but why dwell upon one remote--obscured
by claims of a God-jugglery which belittle it if they be true--when all
about you are countless plain, unpretentious men and women dying deaths
and--what is still greater,--living lives of cool, relentless devotion
out of sheer human love.

"Preach this divineness of human nature and you will once more have a
living church. Preach that our oneness is so real that the best man is
forever shackled to the worst. Preach that sin is but ignorant
selfishness, less admirable than virtue only as ignorance is less
admirable than knowledge.

"In these two plain laws--the individual's entire and unvarying
selfishness and his ever-increasing sensitiveness to the sufferings of
others--there is the promise not of a heaven and a hell, but of a heaven
for all--which is what the world is more and more emphatically
demanding--which it will eventually produce even here--for we have as
little sensed the possibilities of man's life here as we have divined
the attributes of God himself.

"Once you drove away from your church the big men, the thinkers, the
fearless--the souls God must love most truly were it possible to
conceive him setting a difference among his creatures. Now you drive
away even the merely intelligent rabble. The average man knows your
defect--knows that one who believes Christ rose from the dead is not by
that fact the moral superior of one who believes he did not; knows,
indeed, of God, that he cannot be a fussy, vain, blustering creature who
is forever failing and forever visiting the punishment for his failures